impressions made by street painter and preacher often fare alike—the busy world easily wipes out both. But I am persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation, though I thus speak. You will not be behind the dying thief. You will frankly confess your sins as he confessed his. You will seek as he sought, and such seeking is finding; for the Father runs to meet the returning prodigal, and kisses smother the half of his sad story. You will not doubt where he believed; and you also will give all honour to Christ, the Forgiver, and the Lord of Paradise.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE EMPTY GRAVE.

"He is not here: for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay."-MATT. xxviii. 6.

A FRIEND in Jerusalem offered to show me one of the most interesting sights, as he thought, in the Holy Land. He took me to a garden which a friend of his had bought. It lay a little to the north of Calvary. The green grass there, it was found, covered the ruins of former ages, and a large rock-hewn sepulchre had recently been laid bare. When we arrived at it my friend said, "Now this may have been the very tomb in which Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus laid the body of our Lord. It at least belongs to the time of Christ; its owner must have been a rich man like Joseph; and it is nigh at hand unto Calvary." Few objects have ever waked in me so eager an interest, and it helped me to understand every statement in the Gospels about the tomb of our Lord, with the one exception of the stone rolled to the door. As we entered the sepulchre, we had to stoop down as John and Mary Magdalene did (John xx. 5, 11). The door was only some three or four feet high. found ourselves in a room "that was hewn in stone"

We

(Luke xxiii. 53). It was large enough to hold some twenty people (Luke xxiv. 3). It had resting-places for dead bodies, like the shelves of a press, or the berths of a ship. Some of these faced the door, so that the buried body could be seen from it, and one could easily sit at the head and another at the feet of the dead body (John xx. 12).

Not far from that garden we found "The Tomb of the Kings," as it is called. A stone, like a millstone, stood near the door. A sloping groove or trench had been cut for it in the rock. The Talmud calls that stone a "roller;" for it was rolled in front of the door, and so closed it (Matt. xxvii. 60). It was easy to roll it down hill and so shut the door; but any one wishing to enter would naturally say with the women, "Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre ?" (Mark xvi. 3). The stone we saw was very great," and it was about the right height and breadth for a comfortable seat (Matt. xxviii. 2). It was upon such a stone that the angel sat; for the measure of an angel is the same as the measure of a man (Rev. xxi. 17).

During the Middle Ages, millions of Crusaders started for Palestine that they might rescue the holy sepulchre from the Turks. Their spirit was, "Come, let us worship the place where our Lord lay, and fight, and die for it." To-day thousands of poor pilgrims from the heart of Russia visit the imagined sepulchre of Christ, and burn candles at its shrine. All the people in a parish collect money to send one as their

representative, and they believe that they will all share the merit and holiness of the pilgrimage. Some of these pilgrims come all the way from Siberia, and spend two or three years in the journey. Their zeal shames us. We can be pilgrims in spirit, and journey together to Christ's sepulchre. The dust and stones of it, if we could see them, could not make us any better, but its teachings should do us good. Let us approach it in the spirit of Joseph and Nicodemus, who, on the day of Christ's funeral, did bold things for Christ, and beautiful things, and new things, and great things, for they courageously gave Him a new tomb, and "a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight."

There is no vacant place in the universe so suggestive as the empty grave of Jesus: it is a perfect mine of consolation; for it gives the assurance of

I. Salvation.

II. Victory. III. Heaven.

I. Salvation.

Paul tells us that if Christ had not risen, our faith should have been vain, and we should have remained in our sins. His death seemed the end and total failure of His work. But His empty grave interprets for us the darkness of His Cross. His resurrection proves to the whole world that He has done all He undertook for us. The empty grave re-echoes the

words from the Cross, "It is finished."

Then the

risen Christ was both like and unlike His former self. He was unlike, for He had the bearing of one whose work was done with success: He moved with freer step, and was no longer as "the Man of Sorrows." And He was like His former self. He was as ready as ever to save and comfort; He had the very same patience with His erring disciples. You remember how beautifully He instructed the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, and how He cured Thomas of His doubts by letting him put his fingers into His wounds. He had the same care for all the wants of His disciples; for at the Sea of Tiberias He asked them, “Children, have ye any meat?" and He provided a fire of coals, and fish laid thereon, and bread. He had the same spirit that multiplied the loaves, and could not endure to send the people away fasting. You know, too, how He gave Peter a full feeling of pardon by bidding him feed His sheep and His lambs. We have thus plenty of proofs that the heart of the risen Christ is the very same to His disciples as it was in the days of His flesh. Death made no break in His work, for "He is able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them" (Heb. vii. 25). Two great facts were like the two lobes in the heart of the Gospel of the early Church: "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures," and "He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures (I Cor. xv. 3, 4).